Latest post of the previous page:
...which it doesn't.It's as daft as saying "Physics says we know what absolute zero is, but it's useless because my air conditioning doesn't work."
Latest post of the previous page:
...which it doesn't.Nick wrote:...which it doesn't.
It's as daft as saying "Physics says we know what absolute zero is, but it's useless because my air conditioning doesn't work."
Except, of course, that it didn't.This really happened
Seven years ago this autumn, practically the entire mainstream economics profession was caught off guard by the global financial crash and the “worst panic since the 1930s” that followed. And yet on Monday the glorification of economics as a scientific field on a par with physics, chemistry and medicine will continue.
The problem is not so much that there is a Nobel prize in economics, but that there are no equivalent prizes in psychology, sociology, anthropology. Economics, this seems to say, is not a social science but an exact one, like physics or chemistry – a distinction that not only encourages hubris among economists but also changes the way we think about the economy.
A Nobel prize in economics implies that the human world operates much like the physical world: that it can be described and understood in neutral terms, and that it lends itself to modelling, like chemical reactions or the movement of the stars. It creates the impression that economists are not in the business of constructing inherently imperfect theories, but of discovering timeless truths.
All those banks have “structured products approval committees”, where a team of banking staff sits down to decide whether their bank should adopt a particular new complex financial product. If economics were a social science like sociology or anthropology, practitioners would set about interviewing those committee members, scrutinising the meetings’ minutes and trying to observe as many meetings as possible. That is how the kind of fieldwork-based, “qualitative” social sciences, which economists like to discard as “soft” and unscientific, operate. It is true that this approach, too, comes with serious methodological caveats, such as verifiability, selection bias or observer bias. The difference is that other social sciences are open about these limitations, arguing that, while human knowledge about humans is fundamentally different from human knowledge about the natural world, those imperfect observations are extremely important to make.
Compare that humility to that of former central banker Alan Greenspan, one of the architects of the deregulation of finance, and a great believer in models. After the crash hit, Greenspan appeared before a congressional committee in the US to explain himself. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” said the man whom fellow economists used to celebrate as “the maestro”.
In other words, Greenspan had been unable to imagine that bankers would run their own bank into the ground. Had the maestro read the tiny pile of books by financial anthropologists he may have found it easier to imagine such behaviour. Then he would have known that over past decades banks had adopted a “zero job security” hire-and-fire culture, breeding a “zero-loyalty” mentality that can be summarised as: “If you can be out of the door in five minutes, your horizon becomes five minutes.”
LOL!Nick wrote:Alan H wrote:Don’t let the Nobel prize fool you. Economics is not a scienceTwaddle. As we would expect from the Grauniad. He complains about looking at the perspective of economists and then talks about "Swimming With Sharks"! So we can surely ignore his remarks as having any objective validity, can't we?
There's also a Nobel Prize for Literature and Peace. You think they are sciences? For centuries, science got things wrong. That was no reason to abandon science.
And the conclusions about Greenspan are wrong too (just like the rest of the article). I just can't be bothered to try to explain to an audience who don't want to listen.
Fixed it: all the youtube tag needs is the video ID (the bit after v= in the url), not the whole url.anaconda wrote:....apologies for the link error, it's only here that I seem to have these problems.........honest guv!
It's well worth a view, if via cut and paste though.
Dave, for one thing, political theory is a branch of philosophy, and also, Chomsky was criticising US policy back in the bad old days of the Vietnam WarDave B wrote:Not sure I agree with all he has said, but his comments about Irael and the US struck resonances with me.
When did Chomsky become a "political theorist", would say he tends more towards the philosophical side, but, thin line between I suppose.
Alan H wrote:Fixed it: all the youtube tag needs is the video ID (the bit after v= in the url), not the whole url.anaconda wrote:....apologies for the link error, it's only here that I seem to have these problems.........honest guv!
It's well worth a view, if via cut and paste though.
Here's something from a Professor of Economics: Yes, Economics Is a Sciencelewist wrote:As a volunteer in Grantown Museum, I meet all sorts of interesting people. Back in July, some Dutch people came in. An elderly gentleman was with his two daughters, who were taking him on a tour of Scotland to discover their Scots ancestral connections.
He was in his early eighties and while the daughters were in the art gallery, we got talking. He was, it turned out, a retired professor of economics. He had one thing he wanted me to know about economics.
"Don't let anyone tell you economics is a science", he said. "Economics is not a science."
I thought I'd throw that one in.
I'm not entirely convinced that economics is a science, but I'm open to persuasion.Nick wrote:I just can't be bothered to try to explain to an audience who don't want to listen.
Just call me a victim of my own selective reading!animist wrote:Dave, for one thing, political theory is a branch of philosophy, and also, Chomsky was criticising US policy back in the bad old days of the Vietnam WarDave B wrote:Not sure I agree with all he has said, but his comments about Irael and the US struck resonances with me.
When did Chomsky become a "political theorist", would say he tends more towards the philosophical side, but, thin line between I suppose.